


Frightening

by CJ1027



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2018-09-03
Packaged: 2019-07-06 04:39:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15878721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CJ1027/pseuds/CJ1027
Summary: James and Lily comfort one another.





	Frightening

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this a long time ago and just found it when going through some drafts...so I edited it a bit and decided to post it here. Hope you like it :)

_Sixth year, September_

 

“What don’t you understand about _leave me alone?”_

If she weren’t so sad, she would have been able to say this with a lot more of a sting. But her voice collapsed in the sadness, and what would usually be a yell was a mere whisper.

James just wrapped his arms around her. And even as she buried her face into his shirt and told him to leave, she secured her grip around his torso. He knew she would probably regret this tomorrow, and maybe he would too, because _her_ regretting it would only make _him_ feel worse. But at that moment, he did not care about anything else but Lily crying. 

He ran one of his hands through her hair, and though she would deny it, it was quite soothing. “Oh, I understand,” he said, light-heartedly. “But I’m just as stubborn as you.”

“Could have fooled me,” Lily mumbled against his chest sarcastically, causing James to chuckle: the uneven rhythm of his laughter somehow made her smile, just a little bit. He continued to thread his fingers through her red hair that fell to her shoulders. Then, she muttered, “I don’t get why you’re here.” 

James sighed, finding his courage. “Because I’m sorry.” 

Lily didn’t say anything for a few long moments. Then: “Since when have you been sorry for hexing Se—I mean, Snape?” 

“Oh, I’m not sorry for that,” James reassured her. Lily snorted but still didn’t leave James’s person. “Git deserved it. Always does, no offense”

James could feel her breathing quicken a bit. He moved his hand from her hair to her back, rubbing it lightly.

He continued on when she didn’t respond. “I’m sorry that…well, I’m sorry that you lost your best friend. As much as I think he’s the scum of the earth, I…I guess I know how much he meant to you.” 

This is when Lily finally detached herself (slightly) from James’s body so they could see each other face to face. Her eyes were brighter than ever from her tears, and he tried not to show how much he was drowning in them. “Why do you even care about that?” she managed to ask.

“Because I…” he gulped. “Because I care about _you_ , Lily.”

The use of her first name seemed to stun her a little bit. Maybe just the honesty of the statement as well. Her entire posture shifted, and she suddenly realized just how close she was to him.

She put some distance between them, to James’s disappointment, as her face flushed severely. “You? Caring for other people? Didn’t know it was possible.”

“Evans…” 

“Sorry,” she said, quickly, realizing her mistake of insulting him while he was trying to comfort her. “Sorry. And thank you, I guess. I just thought…” she took a deep breath, looking for the right words. James thought that he had never seen Lily so lost for them. “I just _hoped,_ stupidly, that we’d start off this year and what happened after the O.W.L.s wouldn’t matter anymore but it…” she shook her head, biting her lip, looking angry with herself. “It was a long time coming with him, anyway…it’s not like…it’s not like I approved of his little clan, and his mad, stupid, _stupid_ obsession with the bloody dark arts…I’ve been telling him off about it for ages and I…I don’t even know why I’m talking to _you_ about this when you absolutely despise each other…” she trailed off, shaking her head, planting her face in the palms of her hands.

She couldn’t see it, but she sensed James’s stare blazing towards her. “Don’t apologize,” he said, oddly gentle for him, whose voice always echoed with power.

“I sound like a prat,” she observed, burying her hands further into her face. “I’m pathetic.”

“Hey,” James said sternly, and stunned Lily by pulling her hands off of her face, holding them firmly in his own. “You are _not_ pathetic.”

Lily looked at him with wide eyes, which were stinging with new tears forming. “I—“ 

“You’re _not_ ,” he emphasized again, strengthening his grip on her hands. “ _He_ is. Not you. You’re allowed to feel this way.”

He stared at her, quite fiercely, in a strange silence for a few long moments. Lily couldn’t help but compare the similarities between the fierceness of his current face with the fierceness of his expression while playing Quidditch. It intrigued her, and scared her a bit, that maybe he approached Lily with the same heart.

She almost felt like telling him this. But instead, she said, “Stop being nice. It’s weird.”

The intensity of his face faded away into a very small and gentle smile, but some sort of sadness sat behind his eyes. “It happens more often than you might think.”

“Maybe to your mates, but not as a general rule,” she said lightly, as James released her hands, as much as he did not want to. 

“Well, as we’ve already established, I don’t follow the rules,” he smirked. “But you could be more exposed to my kind ways if _you_ were my mate, too, maybe.”

Lily laughed, making James’s heart stop briefly. “Yeah, right.” 

“At least consider it,” he offered.

 

* * *

 

_Sixth year, June_

 

“Leave me _alone_ , Lily,” he whispered for the third time, hoping she wouldn’t listen. 

But of course, Lily didn’t. Instead, she grabbed his chin and forced him to look up at her. Normally, he might seem startled by an action like this from her, but he was too distraught over the loss to respond that way. He couldn’t help, however, the unsettling feeling forming in his stomach—created by both a mixture of Quidditch and Lily touching his face. 

“Lucky for you,” she began softly, “I’ve got a mate who taught me how _not_ to obey the rules.” He glanced at her, thoughts beginning to race. “So, no, I’m not leaving you alone.”

He fought an impulse there, and instead shook his head. “You probably should,” he mumbled. “You don’t want to witness my fits of rage after a Quidditch loss. They’re ugly.”

Lily, fighting against all rationality, kept hold of his chin. “You’re ugly,” was all she could manage to retort, at the moment. 

James snorted. “Mature.” He smiled inside but decided not to show it. He knew she didn’t mean it. And her hand felt warm on his face. 

They just looked at one another for a moment that dragged on in slow motion, and the darkness in James’s eyes from his anger seemed to disappear; the brown in his eyes turning into more of a gold, and the greens making a brighter appearance. This is what forced Lily to remove her hand from James’s chin.

His face felt cold, again.

“Alright, let’s have it,” she said, crossing her arms, sitting there on the bench of the Gryffindor Quidditch Boys’ locker room. “However bad it is, I can handle it.” 

James just looked at her, memorizing the details of her face over again like he did every chance he got. He was just thinking about how her cheeks seemed more flushed than usual, and—was that a new ear-piercing? How’d she even get it? And he was admiring her eyes, as he does every day, when he noticed she was raising her eyebrows at him.

“Well?” she said, tapping her foot. “I’m waiting for it!”

“I’ve…lost it,” James confessed, still looking at her, concentrating.

“I know you lost the game. I was there. Hence, me waiting for your fit of rage.”

He ran a hand through his hair, and Lily swatted it away. “Stop that,” she said, and pretended she did not notice James capturing her swatting hand in his own, holding it lightly at his lap. “It drives me mad, and I am fully aware that you just got off your broomstick, so there’s no use in trying to make your hair any worse.”

He smiled, in spite of himself. “Shut up.”

Lily grinned triumphantly at that one, unconsciously rubbing her thumb against James’s hand. 

“I meant I lost my rage.”

She raised an eyebrow curiously. “Oh?”

“Yeah,” he mumbled, looking down at his lap, and squeezed her hand.

“How do you feel now, then?”

Scared, he wanted to say, as she gave his hand a squeeze back. “Tired. Disappointed.”

“Understandable.”

“Guilty,” he added.

“Guilty?” she asked gently. 

James looked up at her. “They were all counting on me. And I let them down.” 

Lily looked at him softly, and then smirked. “Well, technically, they were counting on the seeker, so only Anderson should feel guilty—“ 

“Har har,” James said sarcastically. 

“And you didn’t let them down—“

“I did—“

“You didn’t! James,” she started, her voice strong, but kind. “You scored more than half of Gryffindor’s goals, you were _beating_ Ravenclaw by one hundred points! It’s stupid Quidditch’s fault that the snitch is worth one hundred and fifty! You didn’t let anyone down. You can feel upset, sure, but don’t feel bloody _guilty_.” 

James, without thinking, interlaced his fingers with Lily’s when she finished talking. He looked at her, concentrating on her every feature, wondering why she hadn’t let go of him yet, thinking back to when her hand was on his chin.

“Stop looking at me like that,” she said suddenly.

James cocked an eyebrow at her.

“It’s the same look you have on the Quidditch pitch,” she said, looking away from him suddenly and down at her own lap, her cheeks flushing pink. “It can be frightening.”

“What?” James almost laughed.

She suddenly let go of his hand, holding her own in her lap, fidgeting nervously. “I don’t know, you just… Remember at the beginning of the year, when we became friends? You…were calming me down about…well, you know. And you kept yelling at me every time I said something putting myself down about the situation, and you had _that look_ …and I recognized it from the way you look when you play Quidditch. It made me trust you. I don’t know why I’m even telling you this, and—” she paused to finally look back up at him. “See, you’re doing it again!”

“Shut up,” he said softly. 

“What—”

And then he was kissing her, his hands holding the back of her head, his fingers threaded through her hair, pulling her face as close to his as possible without suffocating her. And to his surprise, she kissed him back, with the same amount of passion, the same amount of need—although, maybe it wasn’t a surprise. They both had been dying for this to happen already, though Lily would never admit that to anyone but herself (if even herself), and the amount of time they had been spending together lately was making it harder to resist each other. Ever since Lily realized she fancied James she wanted to kiss him, but fought against the desire constantly because it didn’t make sense. But it _did_ , and she knew she was lying to herself that it didn’t. After all, she _was_ holding his face for an awfully long time just a few minutes before, and they _were_ just holding hands, which is something she found them accidentally doing often over the past few weeks whenever they were alone in the common room at night talking in the firelight. But kissing him…it was something else.

And the kiss lasted for a long time, which neither of them could pinpoint how long it was actually for, because neither of them had the willpower to pull away, and they only stopped when they were in desperate need of regular breathing.

When they parted, James rested his forehead against hers, and they could feel each other breathing. James was concentrating on trying to keep the memory in his mind forever, since he wasn’t sure if this would ever happen again. Lily felt nervous, unsure of what was going to happen now because she’s never really sorted out her feelings in her head before about all of this besides the fact that she knew James drove her mental and she wanted him. Dazed and confused, Lily moved her head back slightly just to get a good look at James.

He was staring down at his hands, which he had just removed from Lily’s hair. He seemed concentrated and thoughtful, and she decided to speak on impulse. 

“Well, I hope that at least _that_ made you feel better.”

The dazzling smile plastered onto James’s face after that was simply priceless. 


End file.
